This book is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with all the information you need to get started with mapping using the OpenLayers 3 library.

The book starts off by showing you how to create a simple map. Through the course of the book, we will review each component needed to make a map in OpenLayers 3, and you will end up with a full-fledged web map application. You will learn the key role of each OpenLayers 3 component in making a map, and important mapping principles such as projections and layers. You will create your own data files and connect to backend servers for mapping. A key part of this book will also be dedicated to building a mapping application for mobile devices and its specific components.

I bought this without any knowledge of OpenLayers at all but with quite a bit of programming experience including the basics of JavaScript. The aim was to learn enough about OpenLayers to use it in my applications.

The book has got a nice learning curve with many practical examples so it really has helped me in using OpenLayers in real apps.

However, many of the code examples do not work out of the box and did require some real debugging to get them working. Although this is frustrating it forces the reader to study the API docs of OpenLayers and deepening the understanding of what is really going on.

The code errors are partly just typos which are quite easy to discover. However, partly the book uses features of OpenLayers which have been removed in current releases of OL 3 making some parts of the book almost obsolete. Many of the removed features where marked as "experiemental" (subject to possible future removal / change) by developers and IMHO shouldn't have appeared at the core of a book for beginners - especially without a word about the experimental status.

In summary: A good book for people with some JavaScript experience willing to use the OL API docs in parrallel and enjoying playing with and debugging code. However, not suited for people who expect working "copy and paste" code